Looking at what is and is not "smart" to do , if we want our organizations and our world to be sustainable.

1. Architecting For Resilience and
Sustainability
Stuart Boardman Edinburgh 20 November 2015
Stuart.Boardman@KPN.com
Ed.Harrington@Conexiam.com

2. CONTEXT
Propositions and definitions

3. What do we mean by….
Sustainability
• Wikipedia: “…the capacity of a system to endure and remain functional and
productive over time”
• Merriam Webster: “….method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource
is not depleted or permanently damaged
• Oxford: Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level”
Resilience
• BS65000(2014) Organisational -"ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for,
and respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to
survive and prosper”
• Wikipedia: Ecological. “the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or
disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly”
Taleb
• Antifragile

4. Sustainability, Resilience and Us
The case for sustainability is the same for
organizations as for the planet.
Resilience is a property of a sustainable system.
It requires us to understand how the system
works.

5. Humans and Technology
We create the biggest problems by
trying to control everything.
When something goes wrong we are
totally unprepared.
We make it worse by using technology
to execute our stupid rules.

6. “SMART” THINGS AND STUPID
PEOPLE
Doing It Wrong

7. Some Stories
Predictable but not predicted
• Things that could have been smart but weren’t:
• Emergency generator that wouldn’t switch off
• The car that thought it was broken
• The smart home that wasn’t (ZDNet – the night Alexa)
Black swans
• Burst main causes hospital evacuation causes
traffic chaos
What’s the problem? No systems thinking.

8. My Citroen
The problem
• In the Ardennes, going uphill, almost horizontal driving rain
• Engine cuts out – warning message incomprehensible – some sensor says I
have big problems
• Towed to garage
The Solution
• motor mechanic rubs moustache knowingly
• drills a hole in something next to the engine, says “it’ll be OK now”
• “should I get it fixed properly when I get home?”
• “no – leave it alone”
The explanation
• A casing round the sensor, placed to protect it, became filled with water. No one
had thought of that. Sensor thinks “I’m wet, better switch the engine off”

9. The Hospital Generator
Mains power outage in area around hospital
• Power management system signals emergency generator to switch on
• Generator switches on
Mains power returns
• Power management system refuses to switch back to mains power
Explanation
• Generator hadn’t returned handshake to management system, so it
wasn’t “on”
• So the system couldn’t revert
• Simple design error but typical – assumes everything will work
“normally” - leads to counter-productive action

10. Systemic Thinking
Central
organizational
principle is
relationship and
process – not
structure and
rules
Everything is
part of
something
Everything has an
outside
(environment) with
which it is in
varying degrees
(co)dependent

11. ECOSYSTEM FALLOUT
All about Stuart’s car

12. 666
Now I drive a VW diesel I selected it because of the
low emissions
Now my dealer is
spamming me with mails
about their sustainability
policy

13. Affected Ecosystems
Wolfsburg
Almost 50% of the population
work directly for VW
Local Council budget depends
on company taxation

14. Affected Ecosystems
The state of Lower
Saxony
Shareholder in VW
Factories in 3 other cities

15. Affected Ecosystems
The automobile
industry
Shares down everywhere
The German
automobile
industry
The German
economy

16. Affected Ecosystems
The Netherlands
Tax breaks for low CO2
- Standard 20%
- Diesel (low) 14%
- Hybrid 7%
- Electric 4%
(except above EUR60K)
Tesla just opened a second
factory in Tilburg

17. Affected Ecosystems
Our world
Can regulatory control succeed?
Are we consumers or citizens?
Are we solving problems with the thinking that created them?
If we go fossil free what happens
to oil based economies?
How will shareholders react?

18. The Automobile Ecosystem
• New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on
the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code
• More and more recalled cars – good thing or bad one?
– In July, Ford said that it would recall 432,000 Focus, C-Max and Escape vehicles
because of a software bug that could keep the cars’ engines running even
after drivers tried to shut them off
Source: New York Times 27/09/2015
Get me
out of
here!

19. SMART PEOPLE & STUPID
PEOPLE
More ways of getting it wrong

20. A story about complexity in which ancient wisdom
beats “modern” meddling
Along rivers in Bali, small groups of farmers
meet regularly in water temples to manage their
irrigation systems. They have done so for a
thousand years. Over the centuries, water
temple networks have expanded to manage the
ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole
watersheds. Although each group focuses on
its own problems, a global solution nonetheless
emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for
everyone. Did someone have to design Bali's
water temple networks, or could they have
emerged from a self-organizing process?

21. MAKING PEOPLE SMARTER
Understanding your ecosystem

22. Building Smarter Models
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else in the universe. – John Muir
To understand any complex,
adaptive system, we must
look outside its limits
All models are wrong
But some models are useful.
– Jerry Ravetz

23. Static Models
What we have done for us
What we do
(and how that
works)
(And what we know about that)
What they have done for them
(that’s relevant for us)
And how it might affect us
What else affects their business
That we ought to keep an eye on
Economy
Resources
Policy
Innovation
Environment
Stakeholders
Customers
Employees
Investors
Society
http://blog.opengroup.org/2014/12/30/the-onion-from-the-inside-out/

24. Dynamic Models – Causal Loops
Source: Pallab Saha https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/catalog/D128

25. Interacting Loops
Source: Pallab Saha https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/catalog/D128

26. Dealing With Uncertainty
Checklists
Presentation:
relation to
problem and
to audience
Which
stakeholders are
critical & are
they sufficiently
involved?
What things
are uncertain,
to what extent
and how
much do they
matter?
How good is
our
knowledge
base?
How (well)
is the
problem
framed?
http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/PBL_2013_Guidance
-for-uncertainty-assessment-and-communication_712.pdf
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

27. Operational Models
Agent-Based Modeling shows how ancient wisdom works.
An agent-based model (ABM) is one of a class of
computational models for simulating the actions and
interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or
collective entities such as organizations or groups) with a view to
assessing their effects on the system as a
whole.
Agent-based models are a kind of microscale model that
simulate the simultaneous operations and
interactions of multiple agents in an attempt to
re-create and predict the appearance of
complex phenomena. The process is one of
emergence from the lower (micro) level of systems to a higher
(macro) level. As such, a key notion is that simple behavioral
rules generate complex behavior.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model

28. Smart Things & Smart People
• Let things do what they’re good at
– Machines calculate and react faster
– People think wider, less predictably, bring experience
and emergence
• Continuous exchange of information
between people and machines
– The mechanic and Citroen and my car
• IoT, Data Science, Cognitive Computing –
and the shop floor

29. Theories/Frameworks/Insights
• Systemic thinking and sensemaking
– Beer & Ashby
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
• http://www.esrad.org.uk/resources/vsmg_3/screen.php?page=home
• http://www.fractal-consulting.com/VSM-Intro-Fractal.pdf
• http://talesoftheenterprise.com/2013/06/mr-ashbys-bright-idea/
– Funtowicz/Ravetz Post-normal Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-normal_science
Graves - Service Oriented Enterprise & SCAN
• http://weblog.tetradian.com/2014/10/29/services-and-ecanvas-review-summary/
• http://weblog.tetradian.com/2013/06/07/a-simpler-scan/
• http://weblog.tetradian.com/2015/01/29/toolsets-for-associative-modelling/
– Hodgson, Ison in Learning for Sustainability (ed Wals, Corcoran)
– Heuristics/common sense : BMC, TOGAF
– Via negativia – Taleb in Antifragile

30. Sustainable Architecture: a Profile
http://www.ruthmalan.com/Journal/2014/2014JournalJanuary.htm#Agility_Integrity_Sustain
ability
@ruthmalan

31. @ArtBourbon
Stuart@stuartboardman.com
www.talesoftheenterprise.com
THANKS